With the rapid development of Internet technology, distributed network storage has become a topic of interest for research in the storage field, as big data, cloud and virtualization get popular. Consider a NAS system as an example, which has a modular node design, and an operating system containing a software suite for file system management, volume management and data protection. Nodes in a NAS cluster are constructed as rack-mountable enterprise appliances containing memory, CPU, networking, Non-Volatile Random Access Memory (NVRAM), low-latency interconnects, disk controllers and storage media.
Each node in the distributed cluster has compute or processing capabilities in addition to storage capabilities. The NAS operating system, for example, runs in each cluster node, manages the data stored in the node, and exposes to clients a single intelligent file system that spans all nodes within a cluster. EMC's Isilon® is one well-known example of such a scale-out design. However, traditional datacenter architectures are discrete with respect to compute and storage aspect. That is, although the network system providing storage services has computer capabilities, these compute capabilities are only used for supporting the operations of the NAS operating system and are not provided to users, and in most cases these compute capabilities are idle and inefficient for the network system.